Gemma 4 31B Strains Apple Silicon
A Reddit user says Gemma 4 31B in Ollama idles around 53GB on a 64GB M1 Ultra Mac Studio and crashes on interaction, despite Ollama’s library showing about 20GB and Google’s model card listing 58.3GB for BF16. The post highlights the gap between quantized package size, runtime overhead, and unified-memory behavior on Apple Silicon.
The memory figures differ by precision and runtime path: Ollama’s library entry reflects the packaged model, Google’s card lists BF16 and Q4_0 sizes, and the reported idle footprint likely includes buffers and cache on top of the load itself. The practical takeaway for Apple Silicon users is that unified memory can exhaust quickly, so smaller quantizations, shorter contexts, or smaller Gemma 4 variants are the safer choice.
DISCOVERED
4d ago
2026-04-08
PUBLISHED
4d ago
2026-04-08
RELEVANCE
AUTHOR
TaylorHu